When do spammers not want traffic on their sites?

Slashdot has pointed out that Lycos now has a tool out that is a screen saver that you run on your machine. No big deal right?

This screen saver goes after spammers' sites and puts extra load on them to drive up their bandwidth costs. It isn't a denial of service since it watches to see the response time on the pages and if it drops out, then it gives the server a break - the idea is to get their bandwidth costs up, not bring the server down (which can happen quickly and technically not cost as much as the drawn out system).
It also is not an automated process to get on their bad side, it is a hand verified process. So you might not want to piss off whoever it is that handles that process.

The Register is also talking about it (although you might not want to go there if you haven't patched up your Windows machine since they had a virus attack their ad server recently).

Do note that this appears to only be for Europe, but I don't see why you couldn't still install it if you live elsewhere. Unless you live in Guam - you people make me sick.

Posted by Eric at November 26, 2004 11:12 PM | TrackBack